I’ve Heard them Calling My Name…

Welcome and hello!

Thanks for reading.  I’m very grateful for your interest.

I’m a writer and a theater artist who needs to have her hands in the soil and her bare feet on the earth.   I spend a lot of time in Manhattan in the dirt.

The writing here is about creativity, art, nature, and spirit, the things that have generated magic, abundance, love, and healing in my life.

As I child I shimmied with the monsters of abuse and neglect.  To counterbalance that I was lucky enough to receive the best education anyone could ever ask for, (think Dead Poets Society with many passionate teachers, culturally diverse students, and everyone lives) and I had access to streams and willow trees, wild places that brought me profound comfort.  I spent hours in the woods, training to run away like in the Astrid Lindgren book Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, though I never made it beyond an extended camping trip in the backyard.

Experiencing trauma at an early age can break a person open.    As Leonard Cohen wrote, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”  It took me a long time to get to that light, and what I learned along the way is that our own healing is integral to Healing with a big H.  I know this in my bones.

When I wasn’t gallivanting in the woods as a kid I was reading under the covers, or acting in plays, or writing them, or directing them, or getting in trouble for telling tall tales to anyone who would listen.  Art helps us to process terrible things, honoring our wounds as well as our gifts.  It allows us to spin straw into gold.

I decided to go to New York City to study theater because I grew up in the era of ‘the Muppet Movie’, and so I’d been programmed from the age of two to follow Kermit out of the swamp, as so many frogs had done before him, and head to the bright lights of NYC.

I studied at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and  Playwright’s Horizons Theatre School, soaking in the teaching of amazing artists and living and breathing theater for four years.  I fell deeply in love with dead poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who wrote passionately about the beauty of his beloved Spanish countryside, and his disgust with the squalor of New York City.  I empathized.  I needed to find my medicine or else.

There are now over 500 community gardens in NYC (not there in Lora’s time, sadly) ,that are choc full of artists as they are highly creative, somewhat anarchic spaces teeming with ecstatic green life and full of characters.   I found my way to them by my second semester and never left.   I mentor kids and youth in my local community garden, the Children’s Magical Garden, and I’m on the boards of the New York City Community Gardening Coalition (NYCCGC) and More Gardens! Fund.

There are also fantastico large parks full of medicine plants and trees that I harvest and make medicine from in all five boroughs of the city.   After college I directed lots of off-off Broadway shows, and waited tables.  Then 9/11 happened and a dear uber-talented actor friend died after waiting tables all night.

The seeker in me got busy. I knew that what I was searching for had something to do with the Divine Feminine and with herbalism.  My maternal grandmother was an herbalist, my paternal grandmother was a botanist, and my mother is an avid gardener, so I grew up knowing something of the power of plants, but it’s a lifetime’s study.

Ever blessed to find great teachers, I immersed myself in a five-year shamanic herbal apprenticeship with Robin Rose Bennett and then interned at Lata Kennedy’s wondrous herb shop in the East Village, Flower Power, studying with other great herbalists like Matthew Wood whenever the opportunity arose.

The study of herbs quickly led me to the study of the body, unearthing a pent-up dancer inside of me.  I took a belly dancing class, thought ‘there’s something deeper here…’ and was led to my teacher Dunya and Dancemeditation, a practice that integrates the art of dance, somatics, and Sufi-lineage mysticism.

After working with Dunya and becoming part of the Sufi Dancemeditation community for many years, I became a trained Dancemeditation teacher, and incorporate this work into my own teaching.

Eventually the desire to create, that divine force, pulled me by the ankles back into the theater, this time as a playwright.  My plays have been described as magic realism, which makes sense as that’s pretty much the state of my everyday life.  Poems are my first love.  I’m grateful when they are healing for someone else too.

What it took seemingly forever for me to figure out is that it’s my job to find a way to incorporate all that I am into my work, and that the work is part of a whole, be it writing or teaching.

I lead walks and teach groups how to connect to the world of healing plants as well as to their own bodies and psyches through nature using story, play, the five senses, body knowing, and intuition.

You can contact me for teaching at katetemplewest@gmail.com